Lauren Markoe

Lauren Markoe covered government and features as a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years before joining the Religion News Service staff as a national correspondent in 2011. She previously was Washington correspondent for The State (Columbia, S.C.)

Garson Abuita

My family has been a PJ Library subscriber since birth. I invite you to find a single PJ Library book that threatens children with hell — a concept foreign to Judaism — or pushes God as true or absolute. Somehow I think that someone who finds Dr. Seuss to be “atheist-themed” — in fact that somehow almost all literature is atheist-themed — will be unable to match my invitation much less understand this post.

Atheist Max

Promotion of Judaism to children is not benign.
I can’t share your flippancy about Jewish stories which include placing little Isaac’s throat under his Dad’s sword, to ‘prove love of Yahweh’.
Terrorizing children with such stories is abusive and primitive and it past the time to call it so.

Yes, “The Cat in the Hat” is completely Atheist. As in, no God is needed to tell the story or preach the lessons within it.

Garson Abuita

Your continuing polemics do nothing to address my challenge: show me ONE PJ Library book that portrays the Akeidah (your latest straw man). And your definition of atheist is so broad as to make the term meaningless.

Atheist Max

“Bagels from Benny” – claims that God is the only one who deserves our thanks, not the people around us. It is all servility, authority and obedience. A terrible lesson for children.

“Noah’s Swim-a-thon” – After reading this little book about being good to the needy a reader might be interested in searching for the Jewish story of Noah and the Ark: a wicked story that God (who we are to thank constantly) is the mass murderer of humanity who drowned all of creation in a petulant tantrum.

The objective of all of these books is to co-opt the children, with a charming story and then sell them the invisible dictator who knows their thoughts and will punish them for not obeying Him.

That is not a straw man. These stories are clever indoctrination into Bible stories and all their horrors.

Yes. Atheism is broad. Non-theism and Atheism are virtually the same thing.
If a story doesn’t preach a god – it is Atheism.

Atheist Max

In short
Bring on those “Atheist – themed” books,
open ended as they would be to mythological questions.

All good Literature encourages liberation of the mind.
Bibles and other religious tracts DON’T. Bibles DENY the mind any liberation whatsoever. They are demands of servility to an unknowable, unaccountable supernatural dictator.